


changing suns

by Morning66



Category: Hikaru no Go
Genre: Coming Out, Friendship, Gen, Growing Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:42:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25908307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morning66/pseuds/Morning66
Summary: “So I was wondering if,” Hikaru pauses and looks down at his sneakers hurrying across the cracked sidewalk. “you wanted to go with me to something?”Or: Akari likes Hikaru. He doesn’t like her, but maybe that’s okay.
Relationships: Fujisaki Akari & Shindou Hikaru
Comments: 4
Kudos: 40





	changing suns

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write something longer, but ended up with this instead.
> 
> Hope you like it!! :)

“So I was wondering if,” Hikaru pauses and looks down at his sneakers hurrying across the cracked sidewalk. “you wanted to go with me to something?”

Akari stops in her steps, confused and a little bit excited, but since Hikaru’s eyes are still trained on the ground he keeps walking, making it five feet in front of her before he stops and realizes.

It’s a Thursday afternoon and the sky is already growing dark, though that’s more a function of it being December than it actually being particularly late. Hikaru had been at Akari’s high school with her, having offered to help tutor her go club. (And it was her go club. She’d started it from scratch earlier in the school year, just as Tsutsui had years ago at Haze.) Afterwards, they’d walk home together, a feat that reminded Akari so much of elementary school that she half expected Hikaru to look ten years old beside her, carrying a soccer ball and sporting a sports shirt.

He’d been a little off, she’d thought, a little quieter, something obviously troubling him, but she hadn’t wanted to press. Now, standing in the sunset, hands nestled deep in the pockets of his jeans, flannel shirt hanging open over a plain t-shirt he looks downright worried. 

“Go with you? Where?” she asks, hoping against hope that he’s finally going to ask her on a date. The movies, a walk maybe, something, anything.

Hikaru reaches up and scratches behind his ear, dislocating a few clumps of bleached blonde hair. “Well, there’s this go thing...” he starts, trailing off a bit.

Akari’s heart sinks just a little bit. Anything, but that.

It’s not that she doesn’t like go. She does. That’s why she started her own club this year, a pretty, young first year girl venturing into a world inhabited primarily by old men. It’s why she spends free time practicing for the upcoming winter tournament and trying to persuade her friends how much fun it is. But...

But, she doesn’t want everything between her and Hikaru to be about go.

Still, he’s her oldest friend. It’s not like Akari can decline exactly and it’s not like she will. She’ll take what she can get. She always has, for better or worse. “Sure, Hikaru! What is it?”

Hikaru’s cheeks flush just slightly pink. His eyes drift back down to his shoes and, realizing one’s untied, he reaches down to tie it. “Well, I need to bring someone to the Go Association’s Winter Party,” He sighs into his show. “Everybody else is already going because they actually play go, so you’re, like, my only option, Akari.”

The excitement from earlier rushes through Akari, fast as lightning. A party? A date? Maybe something go related could be fun. 

Akari pulls at a strand of her hair. “You really know how to make a girl feel wanted, Hikaru.”

Hikaru flushes and he mumbles something under his breath that she can’t make out. “So is that a yes or a no?”

Akari rolls her eyes at her childhood friend and sighs like she’s actually annoyed. “It’s a yes.”

_Of course it’s a yes,_ she thinks. _I’ve been in love with you since the third grade, what do you think?_

She doesn’t say that aloud. She’s pretty sure Hikaru doesn’t know that, even if everyone else who’s ever even met the two of them does. He’s stupid like that, she thinks, and wonders why she’s spent half a decade in love with him.

“Oh. Well, cool, I guess. My mom will call and give you the information later, okay?”  
  


* * *

Hikaru’s mom calls later that night with the information and spends a good hour talking to her own mom on the phone. Akari listens from the dining room, pretending to do homework when all she’s doing is eavesdropping in on their conversation.

“Can you believe it?” Her mom says, sounding almost girlish in her excitement. “I always thought they could be good together!”

There’s a pause where Shindou Mitsuko must be talking and Akari can’t help but tap her fingers impatiently.

“Yes, I know, they were cute as kids!” Her mom responds and Akari’s face burns and she leans back over her math workbook, resolving to solve at least a few algebra problems.

When her mother finally gets off the phone, she comes into the room with a bright smile and pats Akari gently on the shoulder. 

“Did you work everything out with Shindou-san?” Akari asks a little nervously.

Her mom smiles and squeezes her shoulder. “Yes! Now, don’t you worry, dear. Everything will work out just fine with Hikaru-kun.”  
  


* * *

  
Akari comes home from school the next Wednesday to Hikaru and her mother in the sitting room. Hikaru’s sitting on the edge of one of their couches, a bead of sweat trickling down his unusually red face, her mother across from him, leaning forward, as if ready to pounce. It’s a scene comic enough to be out of some children’s cartoon, her mother the cat, Hikaru the poor, trapped mouse.

“Akari!” They both echo when she enters, two differently pictched voices both filled with relief.

“What’s going on?”

“Hikaru’s mom just sent him over to discuss outfits for your date! I was just telling him we haven’t picked out your dress yet, but we’d definitely let him know.”

Hikaru’s fingers tighten around the coffee table. His face is turning vaguely green in a way Akari doubts can be healthy. He shoots Akari a disgusted glare and she considers sticking her tongue out at him, but doubts her mother would take that well.

“Oh, okay!”

Her mother rises from her seat, patting Hikaru’s head as if he’s already her son-in-law. “Well, I have to get started on dinner, but why don’t you walk Hikaru-kun back, Akari?”

She gives Akari a wink that makes her vaguely sick to her stomach.

Akari nods agreeably and slips off her backpack, still in her coat and shoes. Hikaru charges out the door, obviously eager to get himself free of her mother’s clutches. It’s cold outside and Akari tightens her scarf around her neck, following Hikaru towards his house.

“I’m sorry about-“

Akari starts to apologize for her mother’s behavior, but Hikaru interrupts her curtly. 

“It’s not a date, okay?”

Akari blinks and takes a step away from him. “Huh?”

“We’re not dating okay? I don’t like you, alright?” Hikaru kicks a pebble and its skids on the cement and down into a storm grate with a quiet bang. “Not like that, I mean.”

Akari’s heart plummets, but she tries to keep a straight face. “I never said we were!”

“Yeah, but people do! They do!” Hikaru gestures wildly toward both of their houses. He breathes in deeply.

Once upon a time, Akari would take his insults as it came, but she’s sixteen now. She’s done playing those games with him. “Would it be so bad to be dating?”

Her voice rings out shrill and high in the cold, barren street. A pained look crosses Hikaru’s face and he starts to stutter something out, but in the end he never says anything. Akari breathes in deep through her nose and turns on her heels and marches back to her house, doing her best to keep her head held high.

When she unlocks the door, she can hear her mother in the kitchen moving around, the sound of something sizzling in a pan. Akari hangs her coat up neatly on the wrack, slips off her shoes and drags her backpack up to her room, where she promptly collapses on the bed, eyes burning with tears she barely suppressed earlier.

She presses her face against a pillow. She’s not sure who she’s more mad at now, herself or Hikaru. Sure, he was cruel out there, but she should know by now that there will never be anything between them. How could there ever be? The entire interaction reminds her of how much he is still the immature, unkind boy she knew in elementary school.

Akari doesn’t come out until dinner.  
  


* * *

  
Akari doesn’t tell her mother about what happened. She can’t, not with how excited her mom seems about the date. That weekend they go shopping and eventually settle on a lavender dress that’s pretty and flatters Akari according to her mother.

The next Tuesday, Akari’s just getting home from school when she hears someone call out to her. “Akari!”

She turns around quickly even though she knows that voice. Hikaru’s standing outside his house, barefoot with no jacket. “Wanna play a game with me?”

Akari blinks at him, surprised and confused. Hikaru shrugs his shoulders and looks down at his feet. She wonders if this is his way of apologizing.

The smart decision would probably be to say no. “Okay,” She says instead and follows him inside and up to his room.

In a way, his room is the same as it’s always been. It’s a little messy and manga litter the ground. Now, though, there’s a goban in the corner, a game half played out on it. Next to an issue of One Piece is a go magazine, splayed open to a picture of a man that Akari knows enough about the go world to know is Touya Senior.

Hikaru clears the board with an easy hand, separating the stones back into the correct bowls and takes a seat cross-legged on one side of the goban. Akari sits down opposite him, her back pressing lightly against his bed. 

“How many stones?” She asks, voice still a little cool.

Hikaru pauses for a second and thinks. “Eight. You’ve gotten better since last year.”

Akari nods and places her stones carefully onto the board, attempting to imitate the way the pros slap them down and succeeding about half the time. Hikaru nods at her moves and, fan held losely in his hand, places his first stone.

Ten minutes pass and they play in a hushed silence. Akari watches Hikaru and wonders how such a gap has spread between them. They were both there when he found the board in the attic, two fifth graders who’d never played a game in their lives. They both joined the Go club in middle school, meeting in the empty science room as the sun set outside. How did he ever manage to advance so much while she stagnated, not even the best in the high school go club she started.

Hikaru makes a move that Akari can tell is especially good (a pro could tell the true depth of it, but even she can tell it’s strong) and she breathes in a sigh. She’s staring down at the board, deciding what to do next when Hikaru says her name, his voice hesitant, as hesitant as it’s ever been.

She looks up, but he’s not looking at her, eyes trained on the board. “Yes?”

“It’s...I mean...” Hikaru twists his hands together in a way that can’t be comfortable. “I’m not into girls, okay? If you know what I mean. So like. It’s not about you, you know?”

He looks up at her now, sheepish, nervous expression across his face.

For a moment, Akari can’t even comprehend what he’s saying. One minute they’re playing and the next they’re talking about what? Then, all at once like some natural disaster, a million thoughts run through Akari’s mind. She takes a breath, deeper this time, trying to focus. She sees how uncomfortable he’d been around their mothers’ doting, how he’d never shown interest in girls, her or others. How he’d been obsessed with that Touya boy since sixth grade. _Well, it make sense,_ she thinks.

Silence stretches and she knows she has to do something or she’ll ruin this. Hikaru’s not looking at her anymore and instead his eyes are fixed on a spot high above her head. The bed’s wood sticks into her back, hard and unyielding, a reminder and a ticking time bomb.

Akari picks up a stone and places it down at 4-3. 

“Okay,” She says, as firmly as she can.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” She says and gives him a smile, weak but real. He smiles back, most of the nervousness leaving his face. Then, he looks down at the board again, eyes scanning to where she played.

“That’s probably the stupidest move you could have made in this position.”

Akari considers slapping him across the face.  
  


* * *

  
“So,” Akari says at they reach the Go Association ten minutes late because Hikaru can’t figure out the subway schedule to save his life, “You’ll have to point out which one.”

Hikaru turns to look at her as they stand in the empty entrance way. “What?”

“Who you like, silly.” She pauses, thinking contemplatively. “I mean, he’s got to be here. It’s not like you’d ever like someone who didn’t play go!”

Hikaru’s horrified expression is illuminated by the sunset. He stares at her for a second, then starts groaning loudly, hands gesturing this way and that. Akari can’t keep herself from laughing.

The sun is setting, but the moon is rising, bright and luminous, maybe not as obvious, but beautiful in its own way. Not everything works out the way you expect it to, the way you want it to when you’re ten and hopelessly naive, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy what life throws your way.

Akari’s pretty sure she’ll enjoy tonight.

  
  



End file.
